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October 14, 2010

SQL Saturday#48 Recap and Slides

With SQL Saturday #48 in the rear mirror now, I don’t want to miss the opportunity to provide some feedback and post the slide decks I used during my sessions. For this event, I ended up carpooling with a co-worker and blogger Dave Turpin (blog). We got at the event location just on time but have little trouble finding the right building once we arrived at Midlands Technical College campus. I was ready to register and grab my first donut when we realized that we were at the registration table of a nuclear medicine event.Clearly, not the right place for a couple of SQL Server geeks. After few minutes walking in circles, we finally found the SQL Saturday signs. More signs the next time around would certainly help. Registration was smooth and the bag and speaker shirt was promptly provided. I missed the first 2 sessions of the day since I had to make few changes to my slides. I regret not being able attend Matthew Campbell's session (Tweeter | Blog) on spatial data. Matthew is a good friend and ex-coworker that has been doing really cool stuff combining spatial data and data visualization. I heard he had an awesome session. This event was also a good opportunity to catch up with some of my friends at Mariner: Wayne Snyder, Melissa Coates and Bill Pearson. I also have a eye-opening conversation with Andy Warren (Blog) about the amount of work and challenges of putting together a brand new SQL event – SQL Rally – and the upcoming SQL Saturday in Orlando.This time around, I decided to shorter my time away from family and decided to skip the speakers dinner and and the post-event party.This was a well organized event and I am looking forward to attend again the next time around.

My sessions had an attendance of around 18 people. I had some technical difficulties with the projector in my first sessions, but the problem was quickly fixed thanks to the intervention of some of the attendees and volunteers. The second talk one went smoother and I got good feedback including some spelling corrections made by Dave. If you are still interested on those slides, you can download them from the links below.